Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a flash memory, and in particular, to a data storage device including a flash memory and data fetching method of a flash memory.
Description of the Related Art
Flash memory is a common non-volatile data storage device, which can be erased and programmed electrically. For example, a NAND flash memory is usually for use in a memory card, a USB flash device, a solid-state disk (SSD), an embedded multimedia card, etc.
The storage array in a flash memory (e.g. NAND flash) includes multiple blocks, such as spare blocks and data blocks. Each block includes multiple pages. When some data are written into the flash memory, the intermediate data may be temporarily stored in a current buffer block of the spare blocks. When all pages in the current buffer block are written with data, the current buffer block may become a data block. When performing random accessing of the flash memory, some data may be still stored in the current buffer block. However, a conventional flash memory controller usually determines whether the data to be accessed is located in the current buffer block or in the data blocks, resulting in performance loss.